Denko, stripped to the waist, paraded across her strip of lawn, trundling her aunt’s old push mower in front of him. The rusty blades made a terrible sound.
But it wasn’t terror that dried Faye’s mouth and quickened her pulse. It was the sight of all that gleaming, hot male flesh five yards away outside her window.
Close enough—her breath stuck in her chest—to touch.
He passed her. The lovely long lines of his back disappeared into the damp waistband of his jeans. She could see his buttocks flex. He leaned over the mower, head bent, shoulders taut, putting his back into the job the way he would work a woman.
He reached the end of the row and turned, revealing his sweaty, abstracted face and his deep, powerful chest with its shadow of hair. Not a boy. Not just a man. All man.
My goodness. Teaching high school hadn’t prepared her for this.
His complete unawareness of her was both seductive and infuriating. He was a man mowing the lawn. Her lawn. And both the normalcy and the familiarity of the act pushed all her buttons.
It was intimate.
Unexpected.
Intolerable.
Ignoring the paper drying on the table, Faye rattled open the door and stepped out on the deck. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Aleksy stopped. He looked up, his dark gaze colliding with hers. Something—desire? anticipation? dread?—fluttered in Faye’s stomach.
He dragged his forearm over his sweaty face. “I’m mowing your grass.”
“I can see that. I want to know why.”
His full lips quirked in a smile. “Because it needs cutting?”
He was right. The lawn was disgracefully overgrown. And she’d meant to get around to it. Eventually.
“It’s not your responsibility,” she said, keeping her gaze on his face. Avoiding that hot, powerful chest.
He leaned on the mower handle. “So what? It makes your life easier. It makes my job easier, too.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s good cover. I’m less conspicuous mowing your grass than lurking around your house.”
Her eyes flickered over his bare, broad shoulders, still winter pale, and his deep, muscled chest. He had a line of black hair, startling against his fair skin, that ran down his stomach and disappeared into… She jerked her focus back up.
“Not to me,” she said crossly. “You’re bothering me.”
“Am I?” His tone was amused. Satisfied. Dangerous.
Her face burned. “The noise,” she clarified. “The noise bothers me.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound particularly sorry. “You want me to stop?”
Leaning against the rail above him, Faye caught the mingled scents of cut grass and hot male. She had another funny tummy flutter. “Well…”
“It’s going to look bad if I quit now.”
Faye surveyed the partially mown yard. He was right. “Well, I guess you could finish.”
“Good.” He grinned at her. “I hate to leave anything half-finished.”
Her pulse pounded. That sounded like a warning. Or a dare.
Possibility expanded in her like orange pigment spreading on wet paper. Three months ago, she might have taken up his challenge. Three months ago, she had a naive faith in herself and an inflated sense of her own ability to deal with things.
Faye stepped back from the deck rail, instinctively hugging her right arm against her chest. She couldn’t deal with things anymore. She certainly couldn’t handle whatever this hot, half-naked man was offering.
“I’ll let you get back to it, then,” she said, and reached behind her back to fumble with the sliding door.
His gaze sharpened. His smile faded. “Faye—”
“I have work to do.” She turned tail and bolted like the coward she was.
It wasn’t just cowardice, she told herself. She needed to get that sheet taped down before it dried or her morning’s work would be wasted.
The pretty landscapes on the wall mocked her. Flat water. Empty sky. Her work was wasted anyway.
She pushed the thought away.
She cut the lengths of paper tape —clackety clackety, from the corner of her eye, she could see Aleksy, pushing, sweating—and pressed them to the edges of the drying sheet to stretch it —clackety clack as he passed the cottage again—and pinned the corners with thumb-tacks.
Silence.
Faye straightened. Her back ached. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears. Was he gone?
Pressing a hand to the small of her back, she walked to the doors. The sun beat down on the green, empty strip of grass.
Gone.
She was…relieved. Of course she was relieved. She refused to identify the sinking in her chest as disappointment. She turned back to her empty living room, but with all the quiet and time and space to create in she couldn’t bring herself to pick up a paintbrush. Maybe she would go down to the lake and take photographs?
Yes. She nodded to herself. That would ease this odd restlessness. She stuffed her feet into sandals, grabbed her camera from the narrow table behind the sofa and went out the sliding doors.
Aleksy sluiced water over his arms. Standing waist deep in the cold lake might help cure his sexual frustration, but it didn’t do a thing to relieve his itchy mood. After three days of surveillance, he had exactly nothing on Freer. No unexplained absences, no unknown visitors, no unauthorized stores of munitions in the gun dealer’s boathouse.
Aleksy needed some action. Now.
A break in the case. A roll in the hay. Anything to kill the mind-numbing boredom and make this exile in Pleasantville feel like something besides a colossal waste of his time. Mowing pretty Faye Harper’s lawn didn’t count.
He thought of the tiny blonde’s bare, arched feet, her wide, intrigued eyes and grinned. Now there was a woman who could provide a man with a little diversion.
Yeah, if he was dumb enough to let himself be distracted. Which Aleksy was not. Not yet. Not without some encouragement, anyway.
He dunked his head. And when he raised it dripping from the water, felt that unmistakable tingle at the back of his neck. His life preserver. The cop’s sixth sense. The awareness that someone, somewhere, was watching him.
Hell.
His sweat-soaked jeans were on the rocky
